Failure to go to the polls may hurt CEO candidates

Do voters care when candidates for high public office have spotty records of voting in elections?

Meg Whitman and Carly Fiorina are about to find out.

Whitman and Fiorina, wealthy Republican former high-tech executives who are seeking to start at the top of the California political ladder in 2010, have missed many elections over the years.

Political strategists and analysts say the issue could be problematic for both, especially when they are competing in a low-turnout state primary election that typically attracts only the most dedicated voters.

The June 2006 gubernatorial primary attracted less than 40 percent of the number of people who cast ballots in the November 2008 presidential election.

“The turnout just falls off the table,” said Field Poll director Mark DiCamillo. “You have only the most committed of the voting population turning out in June primaries.”

California has a history of wealthy first-time candidates for high elective office with inconsistent voting records.

Fiorina, the former Hewlett-Packard CEO who is exploring a run for the Republican nomination for the U.S. Senate to face Democratic incumbent Barbara Boxer, voted in five of 18 elections since she registered to vote in Santa Clara County in 2000, the
San Francisco Chronicle
reported in June.

The
Chronicle
also reported there are no records of Fiorina having voted in New Jersey or Maryland, where she lived before moving to California. The Fiorina campaign maintains the records are wrong but acknowledged she hasn't always voted.

Assuming she becomes a full-fledged active candidate, Fiorina is likely to hear plenty about her voting record from her Republican opponent, Assemblyman Chuck DeVore of Irvine, who says he has never missed an election.

Whitman, the former eBay CEO who is running for governor in her first bid for public office, took more than two weeks seeking to counter a story in
The Sacramento Bee
that said there was no evidence she had ever registered to vote until 2002, when she was 46.

Since 2002, she has skipped about half the elections in which she was eligible to vote, including the 2003 gubernatorial recall election that attracted the highest voter turnout of any state election in decades.

Her opponent, Insurance Commissioner Steve Poizner, immediately pounced on the
Bee
article, saying Whitman's voting record was so abysmal that she should drop out of the race.

Last week, the Whitman campaign produced evidence that she had been registered to vote between 1979 and 1981 in Ohio and in the late 1990s in Santa Clara County.

That may have been a mixed blessing for Whitman. Although it established that she was merely a sporadic voter rather than a chronic nonvoter, it kept the issue alive.

In February, she told the California Republican Party Convention in Sacramento that she regretted not having voted “on several occasions” and that she registered in California in 1998 as being unaffiliated with any political party.